Cumnor Chess Club

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The World Championship match between Anand and Topalov will be delayed until spring 2010, and the UEP bid for organizing the Wch cycle 2010-2011 has been accepted by FIDE. In 2011 there will be either Candidates Matches or a Candidates Tournament with Kamsky, the loser of Anand-Topalov, two players from the Grand Prix, the winner of the World Cup, the two highest rated players not already qualified and a player nominated by the organizer. These are the most important decisions made at the FIDE Presidential Board meeting that was held from March 5th to 8th in Istanbul, Turkey. full story »

For the first time in 25 years, London will have a chess tournament with the world’s best players. From December 10 to 17, 2009 a single round-robin with eight players (five world-class grandmasters and three English players) will be held in the capital of the United Kingdom. The tournament boasts a minimum prize fund of € 100,000 and has applied for membership of the Grand Slam. Initiatior Malcolm Pein: “We’re going to focus on the public and the media.” full story »

SOURCE: www.chessvibes.com

Every chess player grows up learning combinations that work. As a kid, you learn to ’spot the combo’ quickly and you’re told that you will profit from this knowledge ever after. There’s hundreds of books that are written according to this method. But in real life, sadly, combinations often do not work at all. Where are the books written about this phenomenon? Now, we have one. Read more

Sometimes the best books get the worst treatment. It took more than 25 years before an edition of Mikhail Bulgakov’s great novel The Master and Margarita was first published. But this is nothing compared to the 52(!) years it took before Questions of Modern Chess Theory by Isaac Lipnitsky was translated into English. It is now published in a modern edition by Quality Chess. Without exaggeration it’s fair to say that Western chess would have looked totally different, had this book been available earlier. Read more

John Watson is one of the best chess authors around. Currently, he’s writing a series of high-quality opening books, focussing (as always) on understanding and framing the opening in its proper context. I will take a look at the latest volume in his ‘Mastering the Chess Openings’ series, published by Gambit Books, which is about the English Opening. I was especially interested in this part, because I have almost no experience with this opening, yet have always found it extremely fascinating. So what’s in it for people like me? Read more

Kasparov vs Karpov

Contrary to what many people will tell you, the “chess match of the 20th century” was not Fischer-Spassky, Reykjavik 1972. It was Karpov-Kasparov, Moscow 1984. No wait, make that Karpov-Kasparov, Moscow 1984 and 1985. Of course, Fischer’s brilliancy and eccentricity, as well as the political situation between America and the Soviet Union made the Reykjavik match extremely sensational, but from a ”classical drama” point of view, the fight in ‘72 was really too much of a one-man-show. Read more

Veselin Topalov defeated Gata Kamsky today to score a 4.5-2.5 win in the Challenger’s Match in Sofia. In doing so, the Bulgarian qualified for a World Championship Match against Viswanathan Anand. full story »

FIDE is failing terribly in dealing with the Topalov-Kamsky match in a correct and transparent way. It’s also clear to virtually everyone that the FIDE President and his staff have generally ruined the whole system in the past ten years or more, despite their efforts to organize a lot of events. Things have gone horribly wrong – it reminded me of the the war in Iraq. In FIDE, too, we need change. But how can we make it a change we can believe in? Read more

It’s well-known that chess is not only a game, not only art, but also science. I myself became fascinated by chess not because you could beat your granddad with it, or because you could play beautiful attacking games, but because you could look things up afterwards. Read more